Medicine is dispensed in liquid form for a variety of reasons. Children are often unable to swallow pills easily, so many medicines for children are provided in liquid form using a medicine cup. Liquid medicine can often have a thick, syrupy consistency that is difficult to consume because it tends to adhere the walls of the medicine cup. As a result, a significant amount of the liquid will remain after the child has tried to consume the entire contents of the cup. When dealing with a sick child, this shortcoming leaves parents guessing as to how much liquid medicine was actually consumed. After setting the cup down, the remaining liquid medicine pools in the bottom of the cup, but it is still difficult to consume because of its high viscosity, and a sick child with a frustrated parent often do not have the patience to extract the last drops of the medicine in the cup. This wastes medicine, and results in uncertainty as to the actual dose consumed.
One approach to ensuring that a complete dose in consumed is to pour more than the recommended dosage into the cup. However, this is a bad idea because there is no easy way to know how much extra medication to add so as to ensure that the right dosage is consumed, and for some medications, adding too much will result in over-medication. Also, this approach tends to waste medication.